Pension for small and marginal farmers — We will launch a pension scheme for all small and marginal farmers in the country so as to ensure social security to them on reaching 60 years of age… We will expand the Pradhan Mantri Shram Yogi Maandhan scheme to cover all small shopkeepers… Ensure comprehensive social security coverage for all unorganised labourers including insurance, pension etc.

The 2019 Sankalp Patra makes three linked social security commitments. It promises "a pension scheme for all small and marginal farmers in the country so as to ensure social security to them on reaching 60 years of age"; it promises to "expand the Pradhan Mantri Shram Yogi Maandhan scheme to cover all small shopkeepers"; and among its numbered undertakings it lists ensuring "comprehensive social security coverage for all unorganised labourers including insurance, pension etc."

The schemes exist. Pradhan Mantri Kisan Maandhan was launched for small and marginal farmers, and Shram Yogi Maandhan for unorganised workers, with the shopkeepers' extension added. Launching them was the first half of the promise, and that half was kept.

The second half was coverage, and the CAG's performance audit of the pension sector — tabled on 12 August 2026, covering April 2017 to March 2024, which is the whole of this promise's term — is where it is measured. "Till 31 March 2024, 44.92 lakh subscribers had subscribed to PMSYM, against the target of 10 crore subscribers by end of March 2023. In PMKMY, till 31 March 2024, the enrolment in the Scheme was 19.49 lakh subscribers, against the target of five crore subscribers upto 2021-22."

Those are not shortfalls in the ordinary sense. The farmers' pension reached under four in every thousand of the people it was designed for; the unorganised workers' scheme under five in every thousand. Both deadlines had already passed when the audit closed its books.

The older scheme in the same family shows a second problem — retention. In Atal Pension Yojana, the initial target of two crore subscribers by December 2015 "was achieved by 2020, after delay of five years", and of all accounts opened, "the proportion of subscribers persisting in the scheme stood at around 51 per cent as of 31 March 2024." Roughly half of those enrolled were no longer contributing. The audit also found that "inadequate verification in APY further resulted in enrolment of ineligible subscribers."

Two design findings matter for whether the schemes can be trusted with a poor household's savings. First, identity: with no unique primary identifier when the schemes began, "multiple accounts being linked to single bank accounts across APY, PMSYM, and PMKMY". Second, solvency: "Unlike APY, actuarial valuation of pension fund was not carried out in PMSYM and PMKMY." These are schemes that promise a defined monthly pension decades from now, and for two of them nobody has calculated whether the fund can pay it.

The wider sector findings bear on the "comprehensive" in the promise. The Minimum Assured Return Scheme that the pension law itself provides for "was yet to be implemented by PFRDA's pension fund managers". The Employees Provident Fund wage ceiling of ₹15,000, which determines who is inside the formal system at all, "was last revised in September 2014". And where money is already held on workers' behalf, the accounting lagged badly: the coal mines fund held ₹12,130.91 crore in suspense accounts not yet posted to individual ledgers, the seamen's fund had contributions for over 28,000 subscribers unposted and therefore earning no interest, and in the Assam tea employees' fund between 59 and 90 per cent of family pension claims were outstanding at the end of every year, with 99 to 100 per cent of those settled taking longer than the 30-day limit.

The schemes were launched, which is why this is not a nullity. But the promise was coverage for all small and marginal farmers, all small shopkeepers and all unorganised labourers, and the audited enrolment is a fraction of a per cent of any of those groups. Our verdict is not supported.